Kolchak's Gold (34 page)

A man stood on the opposite sidewalk and his eyes flicked across me. Anywhere else I'd have thought nothing of it—a meaningless glance in a street. But it alarmed me. I sensed his eyes on my back when I turned to go down the street.

A block distant I looked back; he was no longer at his post.

I went fretfully on. I knew the neighborhood now; I carried my lunch into a small tavern on a side street and ordered the local wine. People milled in and out; I recognized none of them.

I examined my observational abilities: I set myself the task of reconstructing his appearance.

Unextraordinary. A large man but not huge. No hat, no topcoat. A blue suit cut to reduce a paunch. A somewhat rubbery face, dark hair combed straight back without a part. Round features. Nothing about his eyes; I hadn't been close enough; I had the impression however that he had hairy hands. Not a Slavic appearance; neither square nor swarthy. Western European, then—or more likely a Russian from the White country to the northwest. But I came back to the suit: not Moscow serge. A little baggy but that was from lack of pressing; it had been a well-cut suit, probably a fairly decent fabric. Something German about it; something distinctly un-Russian.

Or was it one of Zandor's people? I remembered his fastidious dress.

Then I remembered Vassily Bukov: the indulgently tailored slacks.

I finished the carafe of wine and left the place. The traffic was noisy. I didn't hear his approach and I was startled when he spoke.

“Please don't look at me, Bristow. Study that radio in the window.”

I saw his reflection ripple across the shop window as he moved past my shoulder and bent to try his key in the door lock of a parked Moskvitch. He seemed to have trouble getting the key in. He had too much of a belly on him to be able to bend down comfortably.

In the racket I could barely hear him. “I'm an American. You're in trouble, Bristow. We've got to meet tonight. Half-past six, leave your hotel and turn right—north. Keep walking up the street until we pick you up. If you're being followed we'll spot it and you won't be contacted. In that case stop and wait by the phone kiosk at the corner by the postal exchange—we'll call you there with further instructions. Got it?”

“Yes. But what danger——”

“Shut up. Beat it.”

He got the door open and slid into the car. It pulled out into the traffic and I took my eyes off the display of radios and cheap clocks in the shop window.

Central Intelligence Agency, obviously. Their penchant for trench-coated melodrama is infamous.

But he'd scared me. I kept my fears buttoned down tight because if I let my imagination go I knew I could go to pieces.

The breeze blew the smell of diesel exhaust across my face. A block distant, smoke spurted from the tailpipe of the blue-suited man's ramshackle Russian car. I remembered him stooping there, fiddling with the key and very carefully not looking in my direction; probably talking out of the side of his mouth like a ventriloquist. Something comical about it: the television absurdity of it.

I went back to the museum but my nerves were in a bad state.

The street meeting he'd proposed was one of the standard ploys to reveal shadows and make safe contact. Abwehr and MI-6 agents had used it in Madrid and Lisbon and Istanbul. It didn't prove my blue-suited man had any imagination; it only proved he'd read the book. Mine or his agency's manual.

I dismissed Timoshenko for the evening and at half-past six I left the hotel and went up the street as instructed. The postal exchange was nine blocks distant. The sky was heavy with clouds; it was cool and a bit steamy. Caution had led me to carry the most important of my notes in the pockets of my suit; they made bulges here and there but my coat concealed them.

A woman like a bosomy Druid waited patiently by a cable pole for her dachshund to finish. I went past her trying to gauge the light automobile traffic in the street beside me. I did not detect any sound or reflection of a car moving along behind me at walking pace, but then they wouldn't have handled it that way. They'd be hanging back a few blocks watching me—watching what happened behind me.

I made no effort to disclose a tail. It was up to my contact to discover him. Those are the rules of that game.

I did not know what to expect. There were too many possibilities; guessing was pointless. Danger, he'd said.…

I reached the postal exchange without contact.

Suddenly I realized what a poor scheme it was.
They disclose a tail on me.
*
So I'm under surveillance. Now I'm supposed to answer that telephone? They're idiots. The minute it rings and I answer it, whoever's watching me knows I'm making a contact.

If my erstwhile friends were watching me from a car—he had implied they were—it would take them a bit of time to get to a telephone. I turned abruptly and walked back the way I had come; I wanted to be away from that kiosk before the telephone in it began to ring.

Half a block ahead of me a man turned into the entrance of a building. When I passed it he was not there; he'd gone inside. He'd been vaguely familiar; I'd seen him before—possibly at the museum. One of Zandor's? My backtracking had caught him off guard; I wasn't supposed to have seen him.

A block farther I made a right turn and strolled down a side street. I didn't check to see whether Zandor's man was behind me; there was little doubt of it. I didn't want to return directly to the hotel because he would have been puzzled by my direct hike to and from the corner where the postal exchange stood. This way I might still persuade him I was simply out walking, limbering up the joints, with no particular destination in mind. I took a circuitous and unhurried route back to the hotel.

I insert these details because it illustrates Ritter's
*
clumsiness and helps to show why I later resisted his approaches. “Intelligence” is a poor word for the operations of most espionage and counterespionage organizations. An unpleasant number of their actions tend to serve as self-fulfillment of gloomy prophecy. On the way back to my hotel I had ample time to reflect angrily that even if I had not been in “danger” before, Ritter's stupid plan would have guaranteed it in the end, if I'd obeyed his instructions.

By nature the operation of intelligence activities is supposed to be passive. All too often it fails in that objective because in the course of gathering intelligence the operative brings attention upon himself and his illegal behavior. This in turn creates exactly the kind of international “incident” which Intelligence, ideally, is supposed to prevent. If I had more time and felt more level-headed I could turn all this into an amusingly comic sequence; essentially that's what it is, once you remove to a certain objective distance. But I was not, and am not, in that luxurious condition. I was afraid.

I was on my way out of the hotel to wait for Timoshenko's arrival.
*
A familiar man was coming up the sidewalk toward me. I almost suffered cardiac arrest when he reached inside the lapel of his coat but what he produced was an envelope; he approached with the envelope extended toward me.

He identified himself stiffly as Yakov Sanarski and waited for me to open the envelope; I found that it contained a new, revised visa. It extended my permit by five weeks.

He asked if this was satisfactory and I tried to look pleased. “Tell Comrade Zandor I'm very grateful to the government.”

Sanarski bowed with a formal little twitch of a smile and walked away, back the way he had come, to a waiting car he had parked awkwardly at the very corner of the block, sticking out into the intersection. He drove away and I stuffed the new visa into my already overcrowded pocket.

Sanarski was the man who had been following me the previous afternoon, to the postal exchange and back. This morning connected him beyond question with Zandor; so at least I had confirmation—I knew who had me under surveillance. This relieved me somewhat. It makes things a bit easier when you know who your antagonist is.

Trepidation thundered through my blood through the whole morning. I couldn't suppress the American agent from the center of my thinking, but there wasn't a thing I could do that would alleviate the tension; the next move was his to make.

He made it at the same hour as yesterday. I went out during the lunch hour for that purpose—in case he was waiting for me as he had done before. I walked slowly along the exact route I'd followed yesterday. There was no sign of him. I reached the tavern and went in.

The place was not terribly crowded; about half its chairs were occupied. One of them was occupied by the American agent. He didn't look at me.

I couldn't very well sit with him; in any case I didn't want to. By destroying state documents I had already committed a grave offense but there was a good chance it wouldn't be discovered—ever. Unless that was what the agent had been referring to yesterday when he'd warned me of danger. But I'd just about convinced myself that couldn't be it. If they knew about the theft of the documents they'd have arrested me, not given me an extended visa. I hadn't done anything else to put me in trouble and I didn't intend to, certainly not by making open contact with the American.

I took one glass of wine at the bar, intending to leave immediately.

From a corner of my vision I saw him get up to leave. He counted coins gravely in his palm and pressed them down onto the table singly, pocketing what was left; he still had his hand in his pocket when he came forward toward the door. His route took him immediately behind me. He jostled me. When I looked around I heard him mutter “Sorry” in Russian—not very good Russian, a terrible accent. He went on outside. His hand was no longer in his pocket.

I finished the wine, giving it a good five or six minutes. Then I went back to the men's room. I was alone in it; I reached into the outside pockets of my coat and found the note, crumpled into a tight ball like something a schoolboy would put in a slingshot. I smoothed it out, read it, tore it up and flushed it away.

It told me to leave the museum at two o'clock and stroll down to the Square of Fallen Warriors, then take the tram up Nevsky Boulevard. There were detailed instructions, what to do step by step. The last sentence was, “Be careful—they are onto you.” It was signed
K. Ritter.

I could only obey it or ignore it. The vague silly warning had its intended effect; I obeyed it, half in fear and half in anger because there was no need for such cryptic melodrama.

Procedures for disclosing and shaking a tail are numerous and they differ according to the purpose of the procedure. It is relatively easy to “ditch” clandestine pursuit if you don't mind his knowing he's being shaken. It is considerably harder to make the ditch look like an accident: that is, to put him off the scent and make him think it's his own fault. He must not know that he has been spotted; he must not know that you have shaken him off deliberately. Yet all the same you must lose him. It isn't easy but classic patterns have been laid down; fundamentally the choice of method must be determined by the number of shadowers who are in play.

I knew the textbook methods and Ritter's was one of them. The instructions in his note had professional weaknesses and that was one reason for my anger. Had I obeyed his specifications methodically I wouldn't have lost the tail. He hadn't taken into account the possibility there would be more than two of them.

I threaded the bleak massive monuments of the Square of Fallen Warriors along a random choice of footpaths. A pale sun filtered weakly through the haze but it was not a cold afternoon; there were overcoated figures on the park benches. I kept an eye out for an approaching tram and when one came in sight I timed my stroll to meet it when it stopped at the corner of the square; I swung up onto the steps and eeled inside without looking over my shoulder but the reflection in the opposite window gave me a glimpse of two long-coated men jogging toward us from the footpaths of the square. Neither of them reached the tram; we were in motion before they reached the curb.

From my seat I saw a four-door Volga squirt across the boulevard; the two men climbed into it and it followed us.

My instructions were to leave the tram at its second stop, four blocks from the square; this would have been sufficient to lose a pursuer on foot but Ritter hadn't counted on their having a car. They could keep up regardless of how far I chose to ride.

Better to risk missing the meeting than to let them see I was trying to lose them. Therefore I had to make it look as if I had a legitimate destination in mind; you can't just ride a tram four blocks and then get off in the middle of nowhere.

As you follow Nevsky Boulevard across the horseshoe-shaped hillside that contains the city and harbor of Sebastopol, you enter the city's commercial district. Here are the monolithic state-industries stores, the consumer-goods sales and services, the maritime offices and executive buildings from which the activities of the port are directed.

All right, I was on a buying expedition; what did I need that was important enough to take me away from the archives in the middle of the afternoon? I finally decided on a hat, since I wasn't wearing one; I had one in the hotel room but I could get rid of it later and pretend I had lost it. The forecast called for snow and windy cold days ahead; obviously I needed a hat.

It was flimsy but it would have to do; in any case with luck I wouldn't be asked.

In heavy
centre ville
traffic I dismounted from the tram and made my way into the crowded GUM emporium, threaded the throng, picked out a dark Russian hat with earflaps and a lining that was probably rabbit, and stood in the queue that you can't avoid whenever you shop for anything in the USSR. With an expression contrived to combine impatience with boredom I let my glance flick from display to display and from face to face, turning on my heels with irritable restlessness; and spotted my two pursuers busily inspecting a table of yard goods where they looked as out of place as two bulls in a hen yard.